The Deathball Tournament
by Blaine Cantrell
Summary: Original story! Please read the A/N at the beginning of the chapter for details.


**Yeah, I know this isn't Hunger Games. It's a completely original book that just has a game that has to do with death. It's probably not as good and it doesn't really say why the Deathball games were started yet. I just wrote this on FanFiction instead of FictionPress because I hate FictionPress. There's no one on it. I'd get much more feedback on FanFiction. So please don't review saying, "THIS ISN'T HUNGER GAMES," because I know it's not. Please just review based on what the actual story is, thanks. **

Looking around the gym, I mostly saw the athletic kids passing a football to each other or playing basketball. It was a fairly large gymnasium, but only one third of my phys. ed. class was in it. Most of the students were outside, either playing a full game of football in the field designated for it, or they were playing soccer on the soccer field. Usually I'd be playing soccer with them, considering it's the one sport I'm not absolutely horrible at, but not today. Considering today was the last day of school, I didn't want to spend it doing what I usually do on "free days." Screw it, I just want to sit around and not do a thing.

I glanced around, trying to find a place to sit. Maybe I could climb on top of the stacked bleachers on the side of the gym; it'd be fairly easy. But it wouldn't be that comfortable, and it's stuffy in the gym anyways. So I went outside, scouting for a tranquil place to be lazy in. The first thing I noticed as I walked out into the summer weather was that there was a slight breeze rolling westward, or to my right. However, the heat replaced the wind in a few seconds, and I already regret wearing this black t-shirt along with my gym shrts. I could deal with it though, heat is a regular thing here in California. Temperatures in the nineties this time of year is as common as seeing a housefly; it's cold that's the stranger here.

Anyways, I keep glancing around, trying to find a spot to climb up. I finally decide to just climb up the tree in front of the football field and sit on one of the thicker branches near the middle. I'd ignore the uncomfortable feeling of the bark. As I walk up to it, I know I can't just climb straight up the tree without any semi-thick-to-thick branches to support me; I'd fall. So I look at the small wooden tool shed right besides the tree, the one the janitor puts all his supplies in. Apparently he thinks the janitor's closet is too small, so he just emigrated to this abandoned shed. I study the texture of the shed a bit, then the tree, and then I know what to do.

I run up to the side of the shed from an angle, jump on it and take two steps across the wooden wall, jump up onto the thicker roof, turn to face the tree, then grab onto the thickest and longest branch I could find and half launch, half hoist my way up onto it, where I climb up higher to a comfortable branch and sit. Yeah. Parkour. I'm pretty good at it now, after spending the majority of Seventh and Eighth Grade practicing it at home and at gym. I guess I'm the only kid here who's good at it, considering I'm fairly...small. Anyways, now that I'm comfortable, I can watch the other kids play soccer, and if I shifted to my left, I'd see the colossal football players do what they do best. Also, high places are where I like to think, because it's hard for me to be bothered when not many people can reach me or even see me.

So I get around a half an hour to myself to think. Well, I should've, but as I start to drift off towards the videos in my mind I hear someone call my name. "Greg! Greg!" It's a feminine voice, a voice that's mostly composed of regular American dialect but has the slightest hint of a British accent in it. I look down from the tree to see a girl, about as tall as I am, with soft black hair that ended in curls, a small strip of freckles running across her nose from cheek to cheek, and pretty eyes that were so brown they almost looked black.

I knew this girl, knew her for a while. Her name was Olivea Henson, and she was in my grade. Freshman - well, sophomore next year, but freshman right now. We've been friends since what, Sixth Grade? Because she transfered here from Indiana at the end of elementary school and because she was new then, no one really talked to her - some kind of "noob-a-phobia." But when middle school started, she was still somewhat ignored, and I felt bad for her so I started talking to her. Turned out, she was a really sweet, caring, and overall cool person. So I introduced her to my group of friends, and they introduced her to this clique of social/athletic girls and now she's probably in the top 30 in terms of popularity in our grade.

"Greg? I know you're up there."

"Yeah?" I respond in a cracking voice. I can practically hear her giggle. Damn puberty. These squeaks have been my punishment since the second semester of Eighth Grade for me, and I wonder when I'll see the end to the blight. I mean, I'm almost over with it; my voice has gotten deeper over time, even though it's not the deepest. There's hair at the bottom of my legs, there's this small, somewhat visible mustache that I have that I haven't shaved yet. Basically, I'm more...developed, but these voice-cracks still haunt me.

"Can I come up?" she asked, her head tilted so she can see me through the leaves and branches of the tree.

Without hesitating for more than a second, I say, "Sure, if you can." She smiles, then walks up to the tree. If she tries to climb up the trunk, I don't want her to fall and hurt her head, so I simply say, "Be careful," hoping she at least uses caution.

No. She just climbs up the trunk without a problem, finding the branches and climbing up them like they form a ladder and in a matter of seconds, is sitting besides me on the thick branch. Well, she _is _lighter than me, plus she's more balanced, and her smaller hands could find the crevices inbetween the bark and tree better than mine, and her smaller feet could rest on those crevices better. So I was staring at her like, "How the freak did you do that so fast?" and she just smiled at me like it was nothing, which it probably was to her.

"Hi," she said.

"Well hello there, lassy!" I returned, using the most humorous voice I could muster. It had the effect I was going for, which is pretty good. I tried saying it in a formal Irish accent, and she must've thought it was horrible - fails make her laugh.

"You're so stupid," she replies, half-laughing the whole time. "And by stupid, I mean that smart people don't climb up a tree and sit during the last day of P.E., when you could be doing _whatever _you want." She exaggerated the word "whatever," to make it look like there were more options than just soccer and football. Well, I guess there is. I hate running laps around the track though.

"Well, look at you. You're sitting in a tree when you could be doing _whatever _you want. Ha ha."

"Yeah, but I know that I'm stupid," she answered with a smile. "A complete dunce, especially because I'm talking to you." Again, she smiled when she said that, not meaning it seriously. We always say stuff like that to each other, making fun of the fact that we talk to each other because both of us weren't exactly the socialites of our class when we met, and now we're somehow on the upper side of the food chain of the grade.

"I must be the biggest fail in all of the Pacific Northwest, for somehow I'm allowing you to be within twenty feet away from me," I say with a smirk. She briefly laughs for a second, then glances away, watching the football players be...the thickheads they are. I'm sorry, but I have no respect for a lot of the jocks in the entire high school. So about every kid on the Freshman, Junior Varsity, and Varsity team...I hated. They're all inconsiderate, immature scrubs who somehow get girls. Sometimes I wonder how they even do it. After watching her look at them a bit, I brought back the conversation. "So...what are your plans for the first few weeks of summer?" She looked back at me then.

"Uh, nothing. Literally. Nothing. My parents aren't going on vacation until July, so I don't go nowhere until then. You?"

"Same. Well, my parents aren't taking me on a vacation until -" Right then, the gym teacher blows his whistle, and I look back towards the school. I jump off the tree first, landing hard on the rough, torn up ground. I look up to see Olivea, but she had already climbed down through the branches and was waiting for me on the other side of the tree. Wow. I give out a brief laugh, then jog to where she's at. We walked inside the gym, where both of us split apart to go to our locker rooms. I go into the room, which reeks heavily of testosterone, and go to my small metal locker, unlocking it and opening it. As I take off my shirt, I look back to see Mr. Williamson, the gym teacher for the guys, going to the middle of the room with a stack of papers. I don't have to look at them to know what they are. We didn't get these last year, but every year in high school, on the last day of school, students get them.

"Gentlemen," he starts. "As is required, I am to hand out these orientation invitations for the Thirteenth Annual Deathball Tournament." Great, I was right. Deathball. Every student from freshman to senior year has to go to orientation - the "invitations" basically tell you that you have to go, I heard - and the few courageous enough to go to the tournament are practically committing suicide. See, for years there's been soccer, football, baseball, all that stuff, but apparently that got boring, so the United States Government, corrupt as it is, decided to patent the idea of "Deathball," where 100 groups of two teams that pass the try-outs fight for a black ball made of vulcanized rubber. You can pick up the ball, kick it, throw it, whatever, but you have to keep it the longest. The team with the most recorded time by the time it ends is declared winner. Well, basically. I think they go until there's only four teams surviving, and then the three teams who spent the most time with the ball all are considered "winners." And get this. It's a bloodbath, too. These games are like the Killing Olympics, with weapons of all kinds spread throughout a big urban arena. You know what, I'm pretty sure some government officials read or watched "The Hunger Games" and said, "Let's make a game like this, but for real. We could also change the rules so we don't piss off Suzanne Collins."

And so Mr. Williamson continued. "Each of you are required to at least attend the orientation for the event, which is listed on the invitations." Just then, as I'm buttoning my jeans, the bell rings. I put my shoes back on and take an invitation from the teacher's hand, looking at it as soon as I get it.

It's not really full of information. It just says that I'm invited to attend the orientation for the Deathball tournament, which is located locally, and that attendance is worth 70% of my grade for both Phys. Ed. and...History? Ha ha, that's cool. I shake my head a bit, then head out of the locker room and go down the hall, where Olivea meets up with me.

"You got an invite, too?" she asked with a sigh. I could tell she thought this was the stupidest thing ever. And I agreed. They make us go to an event that basically explains that if we volunteer, we're committing suicide, and then they expect us to volunteer? Isn't that just idiotic?

I nodded in response. "It basically says that they're making us go somewhere against our will then, to honor the Constitution, has to have us volunteer for the games so it's legal. Volunteering is like signing a waver."  
>She said, "You know what I'm wondering right now? How is it that they give us this invitation that mandates we go to this lecture, how it's worth so much, yet it's the last day of school?"<p>

I knew that question right off the bat. "It counts for next year. On the first day of sophomore year, you'd automatically have an F in all of those classes, making it hard to come back and making it so that college scouts look at our grades and say, 'Oh, look, she had bad grades at the beginning of Tenth Grade and didn't get those credits, we don't want her."

"Okay," she replied slowly. "What about seniors though? They get invitations, but they don't have school after the summer...besides college."

I thought about that question, then said, "Well, there's no seniors in our gym class, so I'm sure they get different ones saying that if they don't go, they get college credits taken off for a semester or something." Olivea sighed at that, disgusted with how the system worked. I didn't disagree, either. I thought it was stupid and harsh how they require us to waste time to go see this big speech for a grade. During the summer too.

As we walked down the hallways, we got to Olivea's locker, which was five down from mine. She opened it and pulled her bag out, putting nothing in it. We had already turned in all our textbooks earlier today, and since there was only one more class, and that was art - which was the only other class I had with her besides P.E. - she took her binder, which was more organized than a lot of people's, and threw it out. "Don't need that," she sighed with a slight grin. She was looking forward to the rest of the summer, I could tell. A summer without volunteering for the tournament, a summer that would only be tainted by that one orientation. I was looking forward to that too. Well, I pictured mine hanging out with Olivea, because she was...practically my best friend. I also pictured my summer listening to music - not that pop and love crap, either. I meant Skrillex, Deadmau5, Zedd, Skream, and all those other people who made Complextro and Dubstep.

I looked at the clock above her locker. Two minutes until the last class of freshman year started. I didn't have anything with me, for I didn't stop at my locker; I didn't need to. I looked back at Olivea to see her shutting her locker, turning to me and saying, "Let's finish the school year."

I nod, thinking, _And start our first summer as young adults eligible to volunteer for the Deathball Tournament. _I've grown up hearing about them, even though my mom never let me watch them, saying they were too graphic. Even in Eighth Grade, I had to sneak onto the internet to see clips of the Twelfth Tournament. I guess I hadn't thought that I'd reach the age to be qualified for it so fast. Eh, just makes me feel more like an adult and less like a kid.

Finally, I follow with my nod with a fake but humorous smile and the words, "And let's start our summer; first stop, the orientation! June 17th,2026!"


End file.
